Political Death

On March 15, 1963, in a converted auto-repair shop on the grounds of the state penitentiary in Fort Madison, Iowa, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Victor Feguer was hanged by the neck until dead. Feguer was a banal and hapless criminal. For all but a few months of his wretched life from the age of thirteen until he died, he was confined to penal institutions. During one of two brief interludes of freedom, he robbed and murdered a stranger. Because he had taken his victim across a state boundary, he was tried in federal court. The only witnesses to his hanging were people who had to be there—prison employees, morticians, a priest, a few reporters.

Victor Feguer was the last person executed under the auspices of the federal government, a distinction that he will lose next week. The intervening thirty-eight years have been an era of progress. Hanging has been all but abandoned in this land of ours. (It is still an option in the State of Washington, but the inmate has to put in a special request.) It was always a nasty business. If the drop was too deep, the result could be decapitation; if too shallow, slow strangulation. Still, even when a hanging is done well it is an unpleasant thing to see and hear. One of the witnesses to Feguer's death, a retired newspaperman, is still troubled by the sound-memory of the surprisingly loud thunk-crack of the rope snapping and the neck breaking. The prisoner dangled limply, but his heart continued to beat for nine minutes and forty-five seconds.

The execution of Timothy McVeigh, on May 16th, in Terre Haute, Indiana, will be altogether tidier, thanks to the fashionable technique of lethal injection, which has many of the trappings of a medical "procedure." And McVeigh represents a better class of federal executee. He is a decorated Army veteran—a recipient of the Bronze Star for his service in the Gulf War. He is clinically sane. He is unrepentant. He killed a hundred and sixty-eight people. No one can say he was not responsible for his actions. Opponents of the death penalty find him a hard case.

Politically, though, capital punishment has been something of a non-issue since well before McVeigh came along. In 1988, Michael Dukakis's opposition to it helped cost him the Presidency; in 1994, Mario Cuomo's helped dislodge him from the governorship of New York. Politicians of the sort who used to oppose the death penalty—Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Charles Schumer, and Hillary Rodham Clinton are among the many names that spring to mind—now support it. Perhaps they are truly convinced, in the inmost reaches of conscience, that state-administered death is a good thing. A more charitable (some would say harsher) view is that they have made a Faustian bargain: they say they're for capital punishment, and in return they get to survive politically. Like many political compromises, it's not necessarily a bad deal. (Would their constituents really be better off represented by people who oppose progressive taxation, public health care, and environmental regulation?) The tactical retreat of the anti-execution forces echoes the tactical retreat of the anti-abortion forces. The latter no longer talk much about criminalizing abortion or forcing women impregnated by rape or incest to carry to term; they talk instead about "partial birth" and "parental notification." The former don't say they think it's wrong for the state to kill people (in fact, they say they think it's right); they say they're troubled by the disparate racial impact, or the possibility that an innocent person might be executed, or the shoddiness of legal representation. And, of course, these are wholly legitimate concerns.

It is often argued, especially in Europe, that the prevalence of official homicide in the United States bespeaks a peculiarly American coarseness: what else can you expect from a country full of fundamentalist zealots and gun nuts? But the truth is that you don't have to be American to like the death penalty. Support for it is as high in, for example, Britain (sixty-eight per cent) and the Czech Republic (sixty-seven per cent), both of which have abolished it, as it is in the United States (sixty-seven per cent in the most recent Gallup poll, down from eighty per cent in 1994). Even in gentle Canada, where there has not been an execution since 1962, support for capital punishment hovers at around fifty-five per cent. The real difference between them and us is that we have fifty-one governments (the states plus the feds) that have the right to decide for themselves about capital punishment, and each of those governments consists of independently elected executive and legislative branches—an arrangement that leaves plenty of scope for single-issue, hot-button politics. In Europe and Canada, only one outfit per country has that kind of power: the ruling party or coalition in the national parliament. Once a parliament abolishes capital punishment, it's very hard to un-abolish it. Even more important, the European Union has made abolition a de-facto condition of membership. A country that decided to bring back the gallows, the garrote, or the guillotine would have to pay a pretty steep price for the satisfaction of offing a few miscreants. But if capital punishment is ever to be abolished here, it will have to be done by the people, state by state and step by step. Our politicians won't save us from ourselves. They can't.

Even so, more and more Americans agree with something President Bush said a few weeks ago: "We understand how unfair the death penalty is." He meant the death tax, and quickly corrected himself. (Capital punishment sí, capital-gains punishment no.) He was right the first time. The prospects for small, incremental steps are actually quite good. Polls show growing, sometimes majority, support for moratoriums like the one decreed last year by George Ryan, the Republican governor of Illinois. There is movement here and there—even, in a modest way, in the Texas legislature—toward suspending the death penalty until it can be determined that it can be justly applied. Unfair in practice is not the same as wrong in principle, but it will have to do.

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.